Via: Daily Prompt – Heal
Image: dynamosquito, Flickr CC
If ever I coveted a superpower, it would be omniscience. I hate not knowing. Absolutely hate it. Each time I learn something new, my sense of accomplishment is so overpowering that I walk around and go to bed with a smile that would give Mona Lisa a run for the money. My engine runs on knowledge and I think it is what keeps me alive. I think this is the reason why I have a fondness for heroines with active brain matters.
I was once accused by a man that I cannot commit to a relationship because romance novels have filled my head with ideas of an implausible hero. This is an unjust accusation to both me and romance novels. First of all, romance novels are awesome and therapeutic. They set standards for both men and women as individual human beings and not for the sake of a relationship equation. There are no ratios to romances and each story is as different from the other as the two persons it comprises of.
Second, I have no problem committing to a relationship. My current manfriend was once my boyfriend, i.e. when we started dating 12.5 years ago he was still in his early twenties resisting to relinquish his late teens. So I think for a person who remained in a relationship without demanding to be made an honest woman out of, I deserve not to have gamophobia thrown outright in my face. My problem is not knowing what will happen after. I don’t fear divorce, I don’t fear unhappy endings. I just can’t abide going into anything without knowing the end result, whatever that may be. When I used to sit in exam halls, I would grade my own paper before handing it in – and I was pretty accurate in my gauges most of the time.
All this doesn’t mean that I’m a person who enjoys using knowledge to put others down, as know-it-alls are prone to do. Nope, I admire people who ask questions to blot out ignorance because I’m one of them. It also doesn’t mean that I go nosing in other people’s business. Other people’s businesses have generally interested me very little throughout my life, to the point where when I recently visited my grandma, I was shocked to learn that my youngest cousin from Mom’s oldest sister now has a two-year-old daughter. And this was not the only family news I had been oblivious to. I couldn’t apologize enough when the level of my callous indifference towards my relatives unfolded at the dinner table where four generations of labors of love were gathered. I’m just a bit interested in the general stuff – you know? knowledge stuff.
You can say my craving for knowledge borders on OCD. I eat peanuts out of a bowl even after I have lost any taste for it just to discover that perfectly sweet crunch. In fact, I cannot open any pack of snacks without hitting the bottom. That motto for Pringle, “Once you pop, you just can’t stop”? Yep, I’m the poster girl for that commercial. I just have to reach the end, even if the ending has been tried, tested, testified to be invariable. Now, thanks to boxed DVDs and Netflix, I also do not watch TV series until the season comes to a conclusion.
Why am I revealing my greatest weakness to the general public? Because it is also the source of my love for reading and writing novels. I love reading romance novels, instead of living one because I know the damn ending. Even if Will Traynor died and conveniently left Louisa Clark all that money to make her dreams come true in Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You, at least we know he will die. The knowledge that the end holds is at our fingertips. And the only place where I may be omniscient is a novel of my own creation, right? Ah, sweet relief.
Must be nice to be God.
The Romantic Quill 